It's just stochastic. A few raindrops always fall in weird places.
Short comments in particular admit many (mis)interpretations simply because they contain less information and leave more degrees of freedom for the interpreter to fill in. For a sufficiently wide spectrum of readers, lots of these different (mis)interpretations will get activated as the same comment lands with different receivers. Some will lead to downvotes. Some of those downvotes will seem perverse and inexplicable.
Different readers have completely different priors. You happened to know that gumby is a friend of Gosper—that naturally collapsed the space of meanings down to a narrow and obvious range of interpretation. But it's not hard to see how a totally different range might (wrongly) occur to someone with different priors. For all we know they thought the comment was putting down Gosper while they were trying to defend him...one thing I've learned from moderating is that it's impossible to predict all interpretations. It's astonishing how unpredictably the same comment can land with different readers. Yet all of this is exactly what one would expect from a stochastic process and enough datapoints.
I figured the author would show up but then later realized he is at stanford so is likely in contact with any number of people who would connect the two. By that point it was too late to delete.
